Cheer up, GOP (short article from Slate)

Cheer Up, Republicans
Youíre going to have a moderate Republican president for the next four years: Barack Obama.
By William Saletan|Posted Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012, at 11:27 PM ET

Presidents Barack Obama, Richard Nixon, and Dwight Eisenhower
Photographs by Max Morse/Getty Images; AFP/Getty Images.
Dear Republicans,
Sorry about the election. I know how much it hurts when your presidential candidate loses. Iíve been there many times. Youíre crestfallen. You canít believe the public voted for that idiot. You fear for your country.
Cheer up. The guy we just re-elected is a moderate Republican.
I know how stupid that sounds. Barack Obama is the head of the Democratic Party. For five years, conservative politicians and media told you he was a raving socialist. In the heat of the campaign, when youíre trying to beat the guy, itís hard to let go of that image of him, just as itís hard for Democrats to see past the caricatures of Mitt Romney. But now that the campaign is over and youíre staring at a second Obama term, the falsity of the propaganda may come as a relief. By and large, Obamaís instincts are the instincts of a moderate Republican. His policies are the policies of a moderate Republican. He stands where the GOP used to stand and will someday stand again.
Yes, Obama began his presidency with bailouts, stimulus, and borrowing. You know who started the bailouts? George W. Bush. Bush knew that under these exceptionally dire circumstances, bailouts had to be done. Stimulus had to be done, too, since the economy had frozen up. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts. Once the economy began to revive, Obama offered a $4-trillion debt reduction framework that would have cut $3 to $6 of spending for every $1 in tax hikes. Thatís a higher ratio of cuts to hikes than Republican voters, in a Gallup poll, said they preferred. Itís way more conservative than the ratio George H. W. Bush accepted in 1990. In last yearís debt-ceiling talks, Obama offered cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in exchange for revenue that didnít even come from higher tax rates. Now heís proposing to lower corporate tax rates, and Republicans are whining that he hacked $716 billion out of Medicare. Some socialist.
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Yes, Obama imposed an individual mandate to buy health insurance. You know who else did that? Romney. You know where the idea came from? The Heritage Foundation. Personal responsibilityóinsisting that people carry private insurance so we donít have to bail them out in emergency rooms and hospitalsówas a Republican idea. Same with Wall Street reform: Thereís nothing conservative about letting financial institutions gamble with other peopleís money in ways that would force us to bail them out again. Even Obamaís cap-and-trade proposal echoed the market-based emissions-control policies of the 1990 Bush administration and the 2008 McCain campaign. And last year, when the EPA proposed a new air-pollution limit, Obama ticked off environmentalists by killing it on the grounds that it might jeopardize the recovery.
Remember how Democrats ridiculed George W. Bushís troop surge in Iraq? Obama copied it in Afghanistan. He escalated the drone program, killing off al-Qaidaís leaders. He sent SEAL Team 6 into Pakistan to get Osama Bin Laden. He teamed up with NATO to take down Muammar Qaddafi. He reneged on his pledge to close Guantanamo Bay. He put together a globally enforced regime of sanctions that is bringing Iranís economy to its knees. Thatís why Romney had nothing to say in last monthís foreign policy debate. No sensible Republican president would have done things differently.
Obamaís no right-winger. You might have serious issues with his Supreme Court justices or his moves on immigration or the Bush tax cuts. But you probably would have had similar issues with Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford. Obamaís in the same mold as those guys. So donít despair. Your country didnít vote for a socialist tonight. It voted for the candidate of traditional Republican moderation. What should gall you, haunt you, and goad you to think about the future of your party is that that candidate wasnít yours.

This is a statement about what Obama HAS been. I think that is pretty clear.

If you want to forecast the future, I'll put all my chips on the bet that he doesn't change much. He's already talking about the deficit and other financial issues rather than anything related to an 'entitlement'.

Their whole arguement is that since some republicans went agaisnt what they stood for republicans are supposed to be ok with it? Hogwash.

Republicans DID go against what they stood for. If they actually embraced what the party has meant, they would've chosen Ron Paul.
Hey..... maybe they would've even had a chance at winning.

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered." - Thomas Jefferson

Any habitual action, such as eating or dressing, may be performed on the appropriate occasion, without any need of thought, and the same seems to be true of a painfully large proportion of our talk. -- Bertrand Russell

Obama has been moderate in a lot of ways. Yes, that doesn't mean his second term will be that way, but you can't deny his first term.
He continued so many of Bush's polices, and was aggressive on terror. Didn't touch the NRA. He was never the crazed socialist some of you made him out to be.

I believe Obama wants to get things done. I don't believe he thinks strong-arming the opposition is the way to get it done and has displayed that in negotiation or in the overwhelming majority of how he administered as president.

What Obama could do better is all the back-slapping and backroom dealing with the opposition that he poo-pooed 4 years ago. I think that's been a sorely missed component to his strategy, exacerbated by having people do his bidding at the ground level with congress.

Eenie-Meenie has badgered me and the mods about removing something he actually said because he's clearly completely sane.

That's seriously messed up. Can you name one other two-termed President that changed their positions radically in the second term? Why do yo think Obama is so different?

Well if I am wrong then Obama will prove me so. But I look at things like him blaming Bush for everything, his open mic gaffes, the ACA and I do not have high hopes for him being moderate when he wants something.

Well if I am wrong then Obama will prove me so. But I look at things like him blaming Bush for everything, his open mic gaffes, the ACA and I do not have high hopes for him being moderate when he wants something.